Commenting on Comments

So, at work we may be a bit atypical, but we've got several WordPress installations that are actually networks of sites.

There is actually a good reason they're separated, but it's more about business logic than programming logic.

All was good for a while, but as the sites got more readers and more spambots started to post, things started to get out out hand every blog post spawned dozens of comments. All the spam catchers in the world won't get it all, so dozens of comments were still coming through on a weekly basis. The problem is that the blog authors aren't really interested in pruning that.

When the comments pile is as high as an elephant's eye, what is clever admin to do? That's right, write a dashboard widget.

Which is just what I did.

Presenting

Comms Dashboard

Comms Dashboard only has one purpose, let an administrator see what blogs have comments that might need sorting out. You can configure things to only show blogs with comments in need of attention, or, if you like pain, you can see all of your subsites.

I wouldn't run this on a large site without some testing, it could get snarly hammering the database for 1000+ sites. Then again, if you're running a large site, you have your own pains to deal with.

Want to discus what I did and how I went about it? Have a suggestion?

Just shoot me an email, catch me on IRC, or hit me up on twitter.